Albany's Magnificent Burden: St. Joseph's Church

ALBANY’S MAGNIFICENT BURDEN

A church too grand for human use

Photo by Joe Hoffman

His tiny claws ticked, echoed against the ornate interior, and suspended him sixty, now seventy feet above the floor.

Swishing his bushy tail to balance on the high archway, he could swivel around to gawk at the scene below: the marble speckled with bird droppings, the looming and water-damaged Stations of the Cross staring coldly down from the walls, and the countless pages of sheet music strewn from the nave to the narthex.

It’s clear why the New York Times wrote in 1865 at St. Joseph’s dedication that the Albany church was “one of the most magnificent edifices on this Continent.” The 14,350 square feet of interior space still stagger the imagination, and the 31 hand-carved cherubim still fly high above your head with an unearthly serenity.

But St. Joe’s past life has faded. About a hundred years after being painstakingly designed and constructed as a place of Mass for the huge influx of Irish immigrants to the area, the Diocese of Albany began closing down the parish in the 1980s.

In 1994, only about 150 parishioners were left to celebrate St. Joe’s ceremonial last Mass.

Now, even for this furry Albany explorer, the climb up the rough plaster set six human generations ago was daunting. He proceeded slowly, vertically, upward towards a chipped stained-glass window; took a last look at the history yawning below him, then disappeared.

The church was magnificent — breathtaking, even — but you can only stand to have your breath taken away for so long.

*****

It was midsummer, and 5,000 people were teeming outside the newly-constructed St. Joseph’s church in Albany.

The call of freedom and opportunity in the middle of the 19th century had brought hundreds of Irish and English families to the north end of Albany, many of them Catholic. They moved into simple houses along what is now Ten Broeck Street: they were carpenters, grocers, small businessmen, and laborers, according to local historians.  

When the third parish in Albany was formed and moved into a new small church in 1843, it took less than ten years for new members to completely outgrow the building.

So the Diocese tapped a visionary young architect — Patrick Keely — to create a church to surpass the hugeness of the congregation.

“St. Joe’s is really the crown jewel of all Patrick Keely’s churches,” said Cara Macri, director of preservation services at the Historic Albany Foundation. “And there’s a reason it’s different -- it’s real.”

The arches stretching up to the vaulted ceilings are not plaster like Keely’s other churches, but heavy wood hauled from the Hudson River’s booming logging business. Cara said it is rumored that Keely hand-carved many of the high cherubim himself.

So when the church was completed, the dedication ceremony had to be similarly elaborate. Archbishop of New York John Hughes led a five-hour long ceremony, with thousands of laity looking on as hundreds of clergy blessed St. Joe’s for service.

The ceremony was so grand and so long, Hughes faltered in the middle of his dedication speech, and could not go on.

“Hughes' discourse was highly interesting,” wrote the New York Times. “He was unable to complete it, however, owing to feebleness and exhaustion, from the effects of which he recovered in a short time.”

No matter. St. Joe’s strength would last for years to come.

Soon, the surrounding area became fashionable for the wealthy Irish to live in. North Albany was in its heyday. The large tower was completed; an accompanying boy’s school was constructed and got up and running. Then in the 1920s, new waves of immigrants from places like Russia and Europe began to move in, and the well-off started to move out to the suburbs of the Capital Region.

It was soon after that the magnificent edifice of St. Joe’s began to show its age. In the 1950s, church publications wrote of the immediate need to start a “campaign of renovation and repair.”

Big buildings take big money, and big supporters. But the movement to save the church ultimately lacked support from the Catholic authorities.

The Albany Diocese told the small congregation in the 1980s that they would have to begin to merge with Sacred Heart. From there, St. Joe’s moved into a state of limbo, first sold to a mysterious local, then back to the Diocese, then to a controversial nightclub matriarch.

St. Joe’s had seen a lot since that tiring dedication ceremony, and at the brink of the twenty-first century it sat abandoned, exhausted, and in disrepair. Afraid it may collapse and unsure of what to do with the property, the city of Albany claimed it by eminent domain in 2003 and handed the deed over to a young non-for-profit historical foundation.

Neighbors pass the chain-link fence separating St. Joseph’s marble front entrance from Ten Broeck street’s sidewalk.

Photo by Joe Hoffman

*****

The small wooden drawer is pulled open, empty, and cast aside on the floor of the narthex, the marble entryway you linger in before you would take your seat if Mass were still held inside these walls.

“Donations for St. Joseph’s,” reads the hand-inked card taped to the box.

Stop and sniff the withered sunflowers still nestled into the carved stone recesses in the walls, then press onwards to the hallway underneath the organ balcony.

Here, table-sized slabs of junk wood painted with cartoony tongues and matchboxes lean against the walls, leftovers from an art exhibition that the Historic Albany Foundation held there in 2010.

In the nave, there is ample room for you to wander the dusty Vermont marble where there once were pews enough to seat 1,700. The stained glass windows brilliantly illuminate the fifteen pews that remain, but you still might trip over a spent plastic smoke grenade or an empty tube of firecrackers.

Don’t jump when you look up and see the cloaked figure perched at the upright on stage. It’s only a wicker statue wrapped in linen, playing “Angels We Have Heard on High” and admiring the tastefully-arranged jars of dead flowers on her piano.

This place has been home to many a creature. Walk far enough, and you’ll bump into a pigeon laying back against the stone, frozen with grey wings stretched out in one final flap.

But whether St. Joseph’s will ever be a permanent home for humans is still an open question. Post the church closing, twelve years of tireless advocacy and millions of dollars in donations have gone into trying to bring it back to life. But the immensity of the task eventually became too much for even these fiery souls.

*****

“There is someone out there for St. Joe’s.”

That’s the gentle but insisting hope of Cara Macri, director of preservation services with the Historic Albany Foundation — a woman who has been in love with buildings since her grandparents took her to an old movie palace as a girl in South Jersey.

Fresh out of studying at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Cara said her first day with HAF in 2008 plopped her unceremoniously into arguing with the city fire chief over an old building that the then-mayor wanted torn down. Those old-growth wood beams are stable, Cara told the chief, but to no avail; authorities knocked it down soon after.

The fights continue to this day. Sitting behind a cluttered desk and enjoying a working lunch of curry and rice off a styrofoam plate, Cara clicked through old photos from when HAF owned St. Joe’s. She can still point out the intricacy of the gold leaf on the ceilings.

“It’s iconic, it’s so grand; it’s so detailed,” said Cara. “The ceiling is hand-painted and just so…” she trailed off.   

Director of preservation services Cara Macri stands by the Historic Albany Foundation display window, which shows off an end piece from a St. Joseph’s pew, the top of a confessional, and a plaster angel.                    Photo by Joe Hoffman

St. Joseph’s was Historic Albany Foundation’s crusade, its flagship project, for more than a decade. But soon, the money and time spent pouring into the building became too much of a burden on the little brick non-profit on Livingston Avenue.

It started with a $300,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, which Cara and the team used to begin the toiling process of stabilizing a weathered column in the southeast transept.

But there was always more to worry about with St. Joe’s — crumbling concrete from the large tower, leaks letting water in, or big chunks of slate from the roof detaching in the winter. Neighbors can still remember when one such chunk slammed into the windshield of a car parked on 2nd Street.

While the Foundation was looking for anyone willing to put up the money and do something with the church, they started hosting art shows in the sanctuary and putting on a music festival every spring called the Restoration Festival, or “Rest Fest” for short.

Weary of offers from crazy interior designers in Manhattan who claimed to be friends with Robert de Niro, finally Cara got a call from someone with some promise: a little craft brewery business wanted to open up a restaurant and event venue in the huge church.

"Look at that building — how could it not be at the top of our list,” co-owner Brennon Cleary told All Over Albany in 2012. “And where else can you dine with angels?"

But neighbors weren’t as sure. Where would brewpub patrons park? Would they stink up the streets? Would they wake up to find vomit on their doorsteps?

Though it was questionable whether the million that Ravens Head said they would spend renovating the church would even have been enough, the plans for a Gothic hipster brewery fell through from community opposition.

Then, insult to injury at St. Joe’s: the day after Thanksgiving, Cara spotted a man with a backpack and wire-cutters strolling out of the building. Copper wiring is worth some money, and now it had all been stripped by a resourceful flipper whom police never caught.

Now, no more electricity. No more Rest Fest or art shows.

“It got to the point where we could either finance the building, or finance the rest of our projects at HAF. We couldn’t do both,” said Cara.

By 2014, the process of signing St. Joe’s back over to the hands of the city was complete.

“It was tough,” she said.

Though there was a caveat: “I don’t have the keys anymore, and it is wonderful to not have the crazy insurance, to not have the ‘Oh my God people are breaking in again.’”

*****

It is now the fall, anno domini 2018, and that slate roof is collecting golden leaves from the oaks nearby. There is no festival to look forward to, no busy repair workers coming in and out of the building every week. The evening light hits the southwest flank of the church, glowing as the sun sets over the Hudson.

At the apartment straight across from St. Joe’s fenced-up main entrance, Libby Bellacosa is walking up the steps to her waiting three children and dog.

The neighborhood seems to be always shifting from considered a “good” or a “bad” part of town. When the Bellacosas moved in ten years ago, they rented the place on the cheap because it was in the latter category.

But living across from HAF’s efforts to liven up the church wasn’t all that bad: they got to go on tours through the building, and they saw local favorites like Deer Tick and the Dunbar Band at concerts there.

“I still remember walking down these steps, in labor, looking up at that huge tower — it’s burned into my memory,” Libby said.

Photo by Joe Hoffman

That tower looms 235 feet above Ten Broeck Street, proudly visible for miles around. Libby’s place is on what once was called “Millionaire’s Row,” since rich Irish at the turn of the century took a liking to the area.

“All these houses along here have beautiful apartments,” said Libby, gesturing down the street at the old brick structures. In the last century and a half, many different types of folk found a place for themselves here: wealthy wood barons, poor European immigrants, and young bakers like Libby.

And for decades the mammoth St. Joe’s has stood watching, waiting for anybody to come find their place in her sprawling interior.

Libby and her husband (whom she says has a complicated analytical job at the Department of Health) are not religious folk, but the church across the way stuns them regardless.

“It’s so gorgeous, you don’t even have to be Catholic to appreciate it.”

In that regard, Patrick Keely succeeded. The architect designed and constructed a massive, intricate, magnificent monument that still strikes awe in the hearts of even those outside the Church.

Cara Macri said that despite having to hand the property back to the city, they’re still looking for a use for the building.

But as the Albany squirrels poke around the yard and play up on the sandstone finishing, one thing is clear: for congregations, volunteers, owners, and neighbors, St. Joseph’s is almost too much to take in.